"I always wish we would have gotten there sooner," said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO, when asked at a Los Angeles trial last week about safety tools that Meta has added to Instagram in recent years. At the trial it was also revealed that in 2015, despite Instagram's minimum-age restriction of 13, it had an estimated 4 million underage users. That was one of the problems that Zuckerberg presumably wishes they had gotten to sooner than they did.
The trial is the leading edge of a group of cases that consolidate more than 1,600 plaintiffs that accuse Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snap of "knowingly designing addictive products harmful to young users' mental health," according to a report on NBC News. At issue is the question of whether Meta knew about harms to young users and whether their public statements contradicted internal knowledge of the problems.
Zuckerberg has been on the radar of parents, school districts, and state attorneys general at least since the 2021 revelations about Meta by whistleblower Frances Haugen that "the company's leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won't make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people."
Over the past five years, research by sociologists and others has shown that while social media can be helpful in the social lives of teenagers, a substantial minority is actively harmed by its use. In 2023, the U. S. Surgeon General issued an advisory about adverse effects of social media on young people, and the American Psychological Association followed suit in 2024. And in December of 2025, the country of Australia enacted a ban on the use of social media by children under 16, targeting TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and X with the threat of eight-figure fines if they are found to be violating the ban.
Zuckerberg's public statements about problems with any of Meta's social media follow a pattern. He presents the appearance of a good technocrat, dedicated first to the shareholders of his company, then to the advertisers who pay for eyeball time, then to the customers-users-products. He assents to the proposition that the first duty of a commercial firm is to stay in business by making money, and then deals with other issues as they arise. But when questions are posed to him that lie outside his worldview, he acts like the robot in an old TV series called "Lost in Space," which when presented with a problem it couldn't solve, said merely, "Does not compute."
For example, when asked whether people tend to use something more if it's addictive, Zuckerberg said, "I'm not sure what to say to that. I don't think that applies here."
The historically-minded observer of these trials can't help but recall a parallel that does not bode well for Meta: the revelations in the 1970s of double dealing by tobacco industry representatives, who knew about the health hazards of smoking for decades yet put up a front of innocence until the evidence against them became overwhelming. It took many years for courageous victims, lawyers, and legislators to overcome the well-funded opposition of the tobacco lobbyists and shills. But eventually, not only was legislation passed prohibiting tobacco advertisements. A cultural shift came as well, which put tobacco use under a cloud and banned it from most public and many private spaces. It is mind-bending to look at old photos of workplaces, TV studios, restaurants, and other locations which are now smoke-free and realize how ubiquitous smoking was in the U. S. as recently as 1970. But entrenched social habits can change, and the history of tobacco use in this country proves it.
There's no such thing as second-hand Instagram, and social-media abuse by teens is not as visible as smoking. But the results can be just as deadly, as many studies have shown how overuse of social media by teens leads to increases in depression, anxiety, and suicide. In countries which have not enacted an overall ban such as the one in Australia, many school districts are now requiring students to keep their smartphones out of the classroom. Parents are rethinking the age at which they will allow their children to use smartphones. And there is a general sense that the harms of social-media use by people under 16 outweigh whatever benefits may result.
The tobacco companies didn't go bankrupt when they lost their ability to advertise in most media, because their products are inherently addictive and largely sell themselves. The same is true of social media, which have revolutionized the whole field of advertising itself to make it unrecognizable to a 1960s "Mad Men" ad executive. In a business in which the customer is also the product and the revenue comes almost exclusively from advertising, it's hard to say what sorts of regulation will help remedy some of the grave harms that social media has already caused.
Frances Haugen's whistleblowing activities were inspired not so much by her concerns for teenagers as by her disgust that Facebook gave up an internal effort to curb political misinformation. A good portion of the current polarized and fractured U. S. political environment is directly attributable to the degraded style of political discourse that social media encourages. This is a less obvious type of harm than having depressed and suicidal teenagers on your hands, but arguably more corrosive to the public's wellbeing in the long run.
If a universal age-limit ban like the one passed in Australia were enacted in the U. S., we would still be burdened with the harms caused by adult social media use. The only thing I can think of that would help in that area would be a cultural shift similar to what happened with smoking after the radical hypocrisy of the tobacco industry was revealed. Such things cannot be legislated or planned. But it's at least conceivable that some day, seeing people standing around at a bus stop with their faces glued to their screens—a well-nigh universal sight today—might be as rare as finding today that most people waiting for the bus have lit up cigarettes.
Sources: I referred to an NBC News report on Zuckerberg's testimony at https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/mark-zuckerberg-testifies-landmark-social-media-addiction-trial-rcna259422 and a Yale Medicine article on the harmfulness to teenagers of social media at https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/social-media-teen-mental-health-a-parents-guide, as well as the Wikipedia article on Frances Haugen.
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